Ocean Vuong, 2023–24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, is the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; it has been translated into thirty-seven languages. Vuong has published two collections of poetry: Time Is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Among numerous other honors, he received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2019. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times, and .

About the Speakers

Ocean Vuong

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong came to the United States as a refugee with his family at the age of two and was raised in a working-class family in Hartford, Connecticut. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, where he earned an MFA in poetry.

Cathy Park Hong

Writer and UC Berkeley Professor of English Cathy Park Hong joins Vuong in conversation. Hong’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is also the author of the poetry collections Engine Empire, Dance Dance Revolution, and Translating Mo'um and the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.